If by a "Liberal" they mean someone who looks ahead and not behind, someone who welcomes new ideas without rigid reactions, someone who cares about the welfare of the people - their health, their housing, their schools, their jobs, their civil rights, and their civil liberties - someone who believes we can break through the stalemate and suspicions that grip us in our policies abroad; if that is what they mean by a "Liberal," then I'm proud to say I'm a "Liberal."
- John F. Kennedy

Thursday, January 18, 2007

True Colors

You would think that with all the negative publicity generated by corruption and it's effect against the GOP in the 2006 elections that Republicans would be eager to get on board with ethics reform. Surprisingly, you would be wrong. Yesterday, the Senate GOP voted as a group against ending debate on the Senate ethics bill. The GOP's first filibuster stops ethics reform. The Washington Post explains:

Senate Republicans scuttled broad legislation last night to curtail lobbyists' influence and tighten congressional ethics rules, refusing to let the bill pass without a vote on an unrelated measure that would give President Bush virtual line-item-veto power.

The bill could be brought back up later this year. Indeed, Democrats will try one last time today to break the impasse. But its unexpected collapse last night infuriated Democrats and the government watchdog groups that had been pushing it since the lobbying scandals that rocked the last Congress. Proponents charged that Republicans had used the spending-control measure as a ruse to thwart ethics rules they dared not defeat in a straight vote.

"It's as obvious as the sun coming up somewhere in this world that they tried to kill this bill," a furious Senate Majority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.) said last night in an interview. "And all 21 Republican senators up for reelection are going to have to explain how they brought down the most significant reform ever to come before this Congress. They brought this baby down."

This extremely important ethics reform legislation is a priority this year for obvious reasons. The voters cited corruption over and over again as the reason for their vote last year. This doesn't seem to matter to the Senate Republicans. We need to stay on top of this and not let this GOP rejection of the voters stand unnoticed and undocumented. It would be a tragedy if the GOP manages to kill this and pay the consequences.